I work for a third-party SharePoint Business Application Template company that has helped hundreds of clients get SharePoint to work for them. We are the only company offering an entire SharePoint Business Suite that runs on premise or in the cloud through SharePoint Online. We focus on small to medium sized businesses that need help increasing the effectiveness and user adoption of their SharePoint solutions.

In response to the article, I agree with all of the points but I must emphasize number 6. Many of the businesses that adopt SharePoint, for whatever reason, cannot afford to have a consultant or full time person to build and manage their implementation. There are many reliable and affordable options for third-party help with SharePoint. My company, SP Marketplace (www.spmarketplace.com), is receiving more and more demand for our product every day. Our templates are fully customizable and designed to greatly increase user adoption and effectiveness, therefore improving ROI.

Check us out at our website or search for us on youtube if you would like more information.

SharePoint really is a diverse platform and that's why I think it gets such hate at times. It can be as simple as an intranet site used for company announcements and simple informational messages or it can be a beast of burden and house everything from calendars to providing an interface to Access databases. I've seen it used extremely well and I've seen it used not so well. In most cases it falls somewhere in the middle where it's done just well enough not to drive a company to scrap it but it's not done well enough that people look to it as their first pick solution. 2013 bringing a better mobile experience will help this but services like Dropbox are going to be hard to unseat as document stores but if you're only looking for a document store then you probably shouldn't be looking at SharePoint in the first place.

New to SharePoint I find it pretty easy to maneuver if you have some time to sit around and work with the different features. We are provided a lot of learning tools to reference if you do run into an issue with SharePoint. I am excited to hear that SharePoint 2013 has good enhancements!

As one of the first 5 developers in SharePoint (powered the Xbox website when SharePoint 2002 was called "microsoft for internet business"), my comment is simple: You can save a lot of pain, dramatically increase user adoption, by adding our User Experience layer and self-service Mam functionality into any SharePoint deployment. Visualize all the files, extract the metadata on ingestion, view all the files (over 450 filetypes and counting) from any browser or device, add html5 video support for a "Business EQTube Experience" for all your users. Do this in a couple of days quickstart and easy deploy, then "Instant-On" the capabilities in any library. To be clear, this is not a simple plug-in like many of the mentioned "utilities" in this article. This is enterprise class infrastructure upgrade to SharePoint that has been adopted by hundreds of SharePoint enterprises to supply millions of dollars per year in productivity gains and approvals acceleration...This will save IT and Marketing departments massive amounts of time and money, while making your users smile. Consider us for a scalablle enterprise adoption and business accelerator and make your users and management very happy. SC Johnson, Monsanto, World Vision, Bentley, L'Oreal and hundreds of other companies are enjoying the benefits of MediaRich ECM for SharePoint. http://equilibrium.com Watch the intro video here: http://eqn.tv/Xs3b7

You have to use sharepoint for what it is capable of doing. For instance, it's not a document management system so don't use it as one. It's good for sharing info within a company. I'm not saying its the greatest but it does the job if you know the limitations of it.

It's a contradiction, but Microsoft is the king of having products that a lot of people use but don't particularly like. Sharepoint is a leading example. Sharepoint may suffer from complexity but it was never designed to be a plug-and-play product. If IT and business groups sit down and map out what they need to use Sharepoint for -- and don't worry about using every feature -- then Sharepoint can be very useful. Having Yammer integrated for social is a big plus. Increased adoption of Yammer via Sharepoint seems inevitable.

Your point about SharePoint needing customization is the key. I have worked with SharePoint in several of my jobs and in none of those cases has the IT department made the effort to make the platform a useful tool. I think you really need a speacilaist or someone experienced to get the most out of it, especialy the new version which apparently has lot of great features. Unfortunately every time I have used SP, it ended up as a huge, unmanageable document dump.

As InformationWeek Government readers were busy firming up their fiscal year 2015 budgets, we asked them to rate more than 30 IT initiatives in terms of importance and current leadership focus. No surprise, among more than 30 options, security is No. 1. After that, things get less predictable.